Undoubtedly, computers, communications and information are driving forces in society today. The most significant advances in computers, communications and information have been in the areas of multimedia, wireless and on-line services, respectively. Each of these technologies have produced significant benefits and have effected nearly everyone's life in one way or another.
In particular, more than 100 million personal computers are equipped with multimedia hardware and software and nearly every new personal computer manufactured today is shipped with some form of multimedia. Multimedia has made the computer much more than a number crunching, word processing tool. Rather, multimedia has turned the computer into an indispensable educational, entertainment and information tool. By combining the realism of sound, graphics and video, multimedia applications have revolutionized the way individuals work, entertain and stay informed. Multimedia has also helped drive the computer industry to provide tools which can be used by the most novice computer user making computers almost as prevalent in our society as television or radios. Also, multimedia has driven manufacturers to build smaller and more powerful and mobile systems—leading a technological revolution not matched in our history.
Moreover, wireless communication technology has allowed individuals to be notified anywhere and anytime of information. Wherever an individual is, i.e. whether away from the office or in the car, he or she can be informed of information, such as new meeting schedules, dinner plans or even life or death emergencies.
Additionally, on-line services have revolutionized the distribution of information in our society by making available, to individuals throughout the world, endless amounts of information on every subject imaginable. The Internet and on-line services have brought together the world through a linkage of interconnected computer systems which can share information almost instantaneously.
These technologies suffer from numerous disadvantages, however. The benefits of wireless technology have only been utilized for personal messaging offering limited message lengths and have never been utilized as a computer peripheral, limiting the benefit of instant anytime anywhere to personal messages of limited length and value. Consequently, information which is sent is typically old and historic.
Moreover, while popular in education and business markets, multimedia has yet to find widespread application in the consumer market. While valuable in education and business circles, the average home user has little use for sound and full motion video. As the number of information providers continue to expand throughout the world, the amount of time and effort required to find information becomes exponentially longer.
In particular, the interface to on-line services is often difficult and intimidating to novice computer users. As a result, the benefit of this valuable source of information is thus not available to them. For example, despite the wealth of information available, users are required to search through the myriad of information, rather than having the information come to them. Consequently, information is often missed.
Furthermore, immediate notification of information is not available. For example, users who use computer related services, such as electronic mail (E-mail), do not receive instant notification when new mail is received. As a result, urgent E-mail will sit unnoticed in an electronic mailbox.
Another major problem is that data transmitted over existing wireless broadcast networks suffer from inevitable degradation. Traditional paging, being a one-way transmission, can use only forward error correction (FEC) on data packets. Many existing paging networks use Motorola's FLEX™, POCSAG or other wireless protocol's error correction/detection capabilities. Although these industry standard protocols provide error detection capabilities, many of them are not able to deal with burst errors or errors due to loss of synchronization. Since these protocols cannot correct all possible errors, some of the data packets will arrive with errors or simply get lost. In most cases, truncated packets and lost packets account for the vast majority of errors after decoding.
Similar problems exist with other forms of wireless communication systems as well.
What is needed therefore is a system and method for data transmission, which combines the benefits of multimedia, wireless and wired on-line services while addressing and overcoming their limitations.